How do you make it rain in the desert? What do you get if you cross the desert with the sea? How do you drown a scorpion?

No, these are not classic Christmas cracker jokes, but actually environmental policy ideas in China. The answer is 6 years, 62.8 billion RMB and a lot of planning permission. These are all things that come easily if you are the Chinese government. The plan seems to be to bring water from the Bohai (east China sea) to the far western province Xinjiang. The project is known as 南水北调工程 or the South-North Water Transfer Project. It seems rather poorly named to me. One only needs a rudimentary glance at the map of the proposed project to see that East-West water transfer might have been a better name.

The idea of the project is to pipe a lot of sea water 5,000 km to the desert in the Xinjiang, create some artificial lakes and then pray for rain. For a bit of distance comparison. That is like London to Istanbul. Or Los Angeles to Ney York and then to Tennessee. Basically, a hell of a long way. Some scientists don’t think it will work, but that hasn’t stopped the CCP before.